Indian elections: The Maoists make a
change By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - Nobel laureate V S Naipaul called India a land
of a million mutinies. All the "mutineers" want to have
their say at the time of elections - even those like the
Maoists who do not believe in the democratic process of
changing governments through
elections.
Fortunately for the country, though
not so fortunately for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP), in the present general elections Maoists have
changed their strategy, and rather than making their
presence felt through bloodletting and punishing people
for voting, they are allowing elections to take place by
and large peacefully, despite the ritual boycott
announcement.
In a measure of the terror that
Maoist groups - more than 50 of them at the last count -
manage to inspire, on the first day of the polling, both
security agencies and media had deployed vast resources
in sensitive areas throughout the country as if
elections were taking place in war-torn Iraq rather than
in predominantly peaceful India. Minute-to-minute
reporting on scores of television news channels from
Naxalite strongholds in the states of Andhra Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand and
Bihar created an atmosphere of near-panic in the
country. But in the end, violence, including that caused
by the gangsters fielded by all major political parties,
remained under control - only 20 were killed in the
first phase of the four-phase elections and 12 were
killed in the second.
It was also a measure of
the failure of intelligence agencies to read the Maoist
strategy. The Maoists had changed their tactics in a
coordinated fashion from Bihar in the east to Andhra
Pradesh in the west, but India's security agencies and
even the ruling political parties were not aware of this
change. By allowing rural voters in most places to cast
their votes, the Maoists and other communist extremists
called Naxalites managed to brew up trouble for the BJP
and its allies. The scrupulous enforcement of a poll
boycott indirectly favored the BJP-led coalition
government.
The BJP and its Hindu-fundamentalist
mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), have
greater support among urban middle-class upper-caste
Hindu voters. The Maoists couldn't stop them from
voting. Their writ runs only in the rural hinterland. By
stopping rural voters from casting their votes, they
were indirectly helping the BJP. But it didn't matter,
as they don't believe in the democratic process at all
and for them all political parties, including their
former comrades, the communists who have now joined
electoral politics, are class enemies. However, as
Sandeep Dikshit of The Hindu, who has studied the Maoist
phenomenon in Jharkhand, reports from Ranchi: "The
genocide in Gujarat and the RSS' inroads in the tribal
[or aboriginal - Adivasi] areas prompted them to
identify the RSS and the BJP as the bigger enemy." And
they decided to opt for the lesser enemy, Sonia Gandhi's
Congress and its so-called secular allies.
The
RSS - or the larger family of Hindu fundamentalists
called the Sangh Parivar - has successfully tried to
enter some rural areas in recent years. The Parivar has
encouraged several of its offshoots to reach the
indigenous people with welfare schemes, largely with a
view to either stopping them from converting to
Christianity or converting them to Hinduism. The
aboriginal Adivasis follow a variety of animist faiths.
Christian missionaries have been running welfare schemes
among them for centuries.
The Maoists have no
quarrel with any faith. But the entry of the RSS has
created a lot of tension in these areas. The infamous
murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his
sons is one of several incidents that have taken place
in the Adivasi areas in recent years. Communal
Hindu-Christian tensions also hinder the Maoist attempt
to radicalize the rural people and prepare them for the
much-vaunted class struggle. With the entry of the RSS
into Maoist fiefdoms, the police too were taking a more
hardline approach in fighting them. The Maoists hope
that with the BJP defeated, police pressure may also
lessen.
The Maoists have thus decided to stop
supporting the Hindu right indirectly by not allowing
the rural population to vote for the opposition parties
such as the Congress, the backward caste parties and the
left, which may be equally inimical to them but are not
hampering their work. The Congress is largely a party of
political opportunists who are not engaged in any kind
of social engineering in the manner that the Sangh
Parivar is.
Another factor influencing Maoist
strategy is the influence of international Maoist
movements. Major Maoist groups such as the Maoist
Communist Centre (MCC) and People's War Group (PWG or PW
for short) gained membership in such international
Maoist organizations as the Communist Revolutionary
Maoist movement. They have begun interacting with
Maoists from other countries such as Nepal, the
Philippines and Peru. The MCC has now even started
adding a prefix "I" (for "international") to its name.
It has also joined the Coordination Committee of Maoist
Parties in South Asia, which was formed in July 2001.
This is the first formal international coalition formed,
though an alliance and tactical coordination among
Maoist and Naxalite groups in India had existed earlier.
The MCC and PWG are particularly important
Maoist groups. Their importance lies in their wide
popular support. Large tracts of India's rural
hinterland are virtually under their control where they
run a parallel government. They levy taxes on the local
businessmen, kidnap the rich for ransom, and loot the
farm produce of the landlords. With the money thus
collected they dispense education, health care and
brutal justice to a population that has not known any of
these in India's hierarchical, feudal, caste-ridden
society.
The MCC operates primarily in Bihar and
Jharkhand. The PWG's main area of operation is Andhra
Pradesh, though it is also active in Maharashtra, Uttar
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh,
Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, West Bengal and Kerala.
The state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar have
recently initiated various developmental programs, and
attempted to modernize their police forces to tackle the
Maoist problem more effectively. There is a growing
realization that hardline police tactics will not help
tackle the Maoists, as the root causes of the growth of
these groups are the poor implementation of land
reforms, lack of effective governance, police brutality
and continuing feudal exploitation of labor and
maltreatment of the lower castes, particularly sexual
exploitation of their women and untouchability - the
imposition of social disabilities on persons by reason
of their birth in certain castes - despite a
constitutional ban on the age-old practice.
With
the change in their strategy, the Maoists are on the
verge of notching up their first election victory. The
PW tried to assassinate Andhra Pradesh chief minister
Chandra Babu Naidu, who was trying particularly hard to
end the Maoist domination in vast parts of his state. He
tried to enter into a dialogue with them as well, but it
didn't work. The Maoist attempt on his life nearly
succeeded and it was sheer luck that he survived. It
will be sheer luck if he survives again - but this time
it is their political sleight of hand he is up against.
Almost all exit polls conducted by various media
say Naidu is on his way out of power. The present
general elections also included simultaneous
state-assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and
Karnataka. If these elections result in his Telugu Desam
Party's and ally the BJP's ouster from power not only
from the state but also from the center, this would be
partly because of the changed Maoist strategy.
Regardless of the fate of the BJP and its allies
that will only be known after the announcement of
election results on May 13, one thing is clear: India's
Maoists have made their presence felt, much more through
inaction in the present elections than through the hyper
and aggressive action they used to in previous
elections.
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